To Live and Die in America

For the kids in Tehran’s underground rock scene, the dream was simple: party, make music, and escape to New York, where the life they wanted was legal. By 2011 three bands—the Yellow Dogs, Hypernova, and the Free Keys—had found their way to Brooklyn. But as their indie community thrived, one of the band members was sinking fast. Nancy Jo Sales discovers how, on November 11, four young Iranian musicians ended up dead.

The shooter came across the adjoining rooftops, wearing a soft guitar case as a backpack. Inside, there was a gun: a Century Sporter .308-caliber semi-automatic with a 20-round magazine, the same class of rifle he’d learned to use while doing his military service in Iran. It was a chilly night, November 11, 2013, and the moon was shining, half full. He made his way across the outdoor art gallery that the young men living in the building at 318 Maujer Street, in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, had fashioned on their roof. One of the last things he must have seen before beginning his killing spree was the 14-foot mural, by the Iranian artists Icy and Sot, of a girl with a red-white-blue-and-yellow peace sign splashed across her accusing face.

He climbed down onto the terrace of the third floor of the building—a plain white building, once a commercial property, now home to the Yellow Dogs. They were an indie rock band from Tehran, a collection of four beautiful-looking boys, all in their 20s, with wild dark hair and inky almond-shaped eyes. Their hard-driving, psychedelic postpunk shows were drawing crowds in the Brooklyn music scene and beyond, and their house on Maujer Street was always full of friends, groupies, music, partying, full of life. They had re-created a little piece of home for themselves there, where they were always surrounded by each other, never alone; they cooked and smoked and sat and joked and spoke in Farsi to one another, just as they had been doing that night.

Artists and brothers Icy and Sot.

They had left Iran because playing their music was illegal there, not approved by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance; but the Yellow Dogs had never been political by design. “We don’t want to change the world—we just want to play music,” their lead singer, Siavash “Obash” Karampour, told CNN in 2009, in what was considered to be a risky interview, exposing their underground scene. That same year, they left behind their families, all of whom supported them in immigrating to the United States. “I see the humanity between him and his bandmates,” Obash’s mother told CNN; she wore a veil. More than a band, the Yellow Dogs were a brotherhood.

The shooter was on a mission to end all that.

Fighting for the Right to Party

The story of the Yellow Dogs is really the story of three Iranian bands: Hypernova, the Yellow Dogs, and the Free Keys. All say they’re not politically minded, but it’s almost impossible to talk about their origins and their journey to America without talking about conditions in Iran at the time of their coming-of-age. They were the first generation after the Iranian revolution. During the eight-year war with Iraq (1980–88), some were young children, others not yet born. By the time the boys in the first bands of the new Iranian rock movement became teens, in the mid-90s, there was a growing restless spirit among the young.

Kids—typically more secular kids who lived in cities—were now into fashion; they wanted to drink alcohol and listen to American music, like kids all over the world. Many of the things they wanted were forbidden by the Islamic republic, but there were always ways to get them, if you had the resources. The free-market policies of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, president from 1989 to 1997, were growing the economy. A class of people had become quite wealthy, and their children had the funds with which to finance some fun. There was skiing at the spectacular Shemshak ski resort, about an hour north of Tehran. “We had a party with weed on a boat on the Caspian Sea,” says Nima Behnoud, 37, the fashion designer.

None of this was really surprising, given Iran’s level of modernization, pre-revolution, but it was all in contrast to images of the country that were being presented by the Western media. “I didn’t even know Iran had pavement,” says the artist Amir H. Akhavan, 33, who went back to Tehran from America with his family when he was a teen. “I was expecting to land in an oasis with camels,” but instead “there were all these very cool, educated people.”

And they were having parties—wild blowouts which became heightened in intensity because they were illicit, underground. Although the scene consisted of only about a thousand people, they were the type of people who knew how to work the system—many of them private-school kids from the Horace Manns and Daltons of Tehran. “We were exactly like American kids,” says the filmmaker Nariman Hamed, 31. “We were on a mission to party. Our parents were revolutionaries—they had defied the Shah’s regime—and now we were taking that energy and fighting the police to party.” In the basements and living rooms of well-off kids there was liquor and pot and boys and girls, all dancing together. There was even a burgeoning hookup culture.

But there was not a lot of live music. There were D.J.’s who played electronic and house music; there was not much rock ’n’ roll. Enter Raam Emami, a.k.a. King Raam, now 33, then an Iranian teen who had spent his childhood in America while his father, a college professor, was getting his Ph.D. at the University of Oregon. While doing his mandatory military service back in Iran, Raam met Kami Babaie, who could play the drums, and—bonding over their love of illegally obtained Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin CDs—in the year 2000 they decided to form a band. “For the first few years it was basic rock covers” at the house parties of their rich friends, says Raam. “We were just having fun. And then I came to the realization, We may be onto something bigger here.”

Mohammad Khatami, president from 1997 to 2005, had a reformist platform, which advocated for opening a dialogue with the West and promised a more tolerant society; his administration saw the end of the infamous Chain Murders of the 80s and 90s in which dissident political figures, intellectuals, and artists were killed. And so Raam, as front man, drummer Kami, and guitarist Poya Esghai, then known as the Untitled, were relatively unharassed as they performed live shows in clandestine studios and an underground parking lot. In 2005, when Kami and Poya went off to study abroad, Raam started looking for new musicians among the “skater punk kids” hanging out in Ghori Park, also known as “the Frog Park,” for its abundance of frogs, in the northern part of Tehran.

“It was like the Haight-Ashbury of Tehran,” says Obash Karampour, 24. “Kids would come out there to smoke a joint with their friends. It was the only park that had [graffiti] tags, even in the bathrooms.” The future members of the Yellow Dogs all hung out there—Obash, Koroush “Koory” Mirzaei, and Soroush “Looloosh” and Arash Farazmand (they were brothers; their parents, Farzaneh Shabani and Majid Farazmand, are well-known screenwriters). Then in their mid-teens, they represented a new wave. “They were very fresh,” Raam says. “They were just really cool.” From among this crowd he invited Koory to be a bassist and Looloosh to be a guitarist in a new band, Hypernova. Now their two scenes had merged.

While the rich kids in Tehran had parties and designer clothes and luxury cars (Iran’s second-biggest industry, after oil, is cars), the kids of Ghori Park were more middle-class, into punk rock and street art. These were kids who—with Internet access granted by a friend whose father had DSL through a government job—were listening to the Strokes, Modest Mouse, and the Clash, and watching Jackass, for which they had a special love. The rebelliousness and absurdity of the show seemed to appeal to them, kids whose days started off with chanting “Death to America” in schools where their fellow classmates could be spies for the authorities and beatings were common. Pooya Hosseini, 28, a founding member of the Free Keys, says his teachers “beat me up so bad. A huge man kicking my chest when I’m 12.”

Pooya was, by his own account, “the worst kid ever,” always in trouble—but his mother and father, a college professor, were tolerant and supportive, even when Pooya and his friends started to build an elaborate music studio and quasi-nightclub in the basement of their house. Friends donated money to outfit the place with soundproofing and instruments. It was a musical clubhouse with graffiti and pictures of Kurt Cobain and the Beatles on the walls. Known to kids simply as Zirzamine—“the Basement”—it became a central gathering spot for a new Iranian counterculture. Reminiscent of American hippies in the 60s—they even grew out their hair—the kids there explored alternative religions (Zoroastrianism, the ancient religion of Iran) and pondered the poetry of Omar Khayyám. “It was the whole thing of ‘Be yourself. Do what you wanna do,’ ” says Anthony Azarmgin, 28, a sometime bassist for the Free Keys. “The first time I went there, I was like, What is this, a political gathering? But no, they were watching a live show on the computer, playing Xbox, getting high, jamming out.”

The Yellow Dogs—who took their name from a Farsi expression meaning a troublemaker, a rascal—formed there in 2006 (then with drummer Sina Khorrami), and so did the Free Keys, with Pooya as guitarist, Arya Afshar as bassist, and Arash as drummer. The Yellow Dogs played their first live show there in 2007. “They”—the kids in the audience—“were losing their virginity to the rock ’n’ roll,” says Obash. “It was a macaroni salad of kids.”

In the Basement, they talked about their dreams, how they would one day go to New York. And there was another kid who sometimes came, a quiet, somewhat awkward redheaded boy named Ali Akbar Rafie. The shooter.

Persia’s Cool Cats

‘This is what shocks me,” says Anthony Azarmgin. “Arash and him”—the shooter, Ali Akbar, who went by “A.K.”—“were tripping on acid together. I was on the road with my bike in India, in Goa, and I saw these two having fun, laughing their asses off. Just running around. And then how could someone do that, when they shared something like that trip? How can you be so fuckin’ dark?”

People who knew A.K. then say there was never any indication that four years later he would kill Arash, 28; his brother Looloosh, 27; and an Iranian-American singer-songwriter named Ali Eskandarian, 35, who happened to be living with them at the time. Or himself, at 29. “He didn’t seem aggressive,” Anthony says. “Later, people said he was driving them crazy, using their belongings and stealing money. But he seemed harmless.”

Between 2008 and 2009, some of the boys in the Basement scene spent time in India together—Pooya, Arash, Anthony, Koory, and a few others, including A.K., who was then the bassist for a metal band called Vandida. He came from a more conservative, religious family than the other boys, but he was part of their world, a kid who was into rock. So it wasn’t unusual that he would come along on their trip—which was inspired by the desire to visit Goa, “the Burning Man of India,” as well as the fear of the Iranian government’s retribution for some of them having appeared in No One Knows About Persian Cats (2009), which was coming out the following year. “We were scared to stay in Iran,” says Pooya.

Persian Cats was a film by Iranian director Bahman Ghobadi about the underground rock scene in Tehran (it won the Special Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes). Although fictionalized, the film depicted the way Iranian rock bands formed and played and used shadowy brokers to obtain passports to get out of the country. It showcased several actual bands, including the Yellow Dogs and the Free Keys. And some of it was filmed in the Basement. It was an explicit indictment of censorship in Iran. Ghobadi now lives in exile in Europe.

India was a way station for the boys, but they hoped, as one put it, to find a way to “get the hell out of Iran.” During the conservative, hard-line regime of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president from 2005 to 2013, basic human rights in the country had deteriorated. Many of the kids from the Basement scene had been arrested for petty infractions; one of their friends had been charged with “Satan worship” for being in a rock band.

Meanwhile, Hypernova was finding some success in the United States. In 2007 the band had been invited to play at the SXSW (South by Southwest) Music Festival, in Austin. Such an invitation was all they needed to apply for temporary artists’ visas to come to America. Since Koory and Looloosh hadn’t done their military service yet, and therefore didn’t have passports, Raam had re-formed the band with Kami, Kodi Najm, and Jam Goodarzi. “Being from the ‘Axis of Evil,’ ” Raam says, “it was a nightmare for us to get visas.”

But they did, in Dubai—with the help of a letter from Senator Charles Schumer, of New York, who was persuaded they were culturally relevant—and within days of landing in the United States they were being interviewed by ABC, MTV, and The New York Times, enjoying the kind of fame usually awarded a much bigger band. They had a built-in myth: they were the indie rockers who had escaped Iranian oppression. The sudden attention, Raam says, “was very dangerous for all of us. We were these exotic animals—and they can play instruments.”

Pooya Hosseini, front man for the band the Free Keys.

Within two years, they went from sleeping on friends’ couches in New York to touring with the vintage British rock band Sisters of Mercy and living the high life in L.A. “We were partying with famous people every day, doing lines with famous people,” Raam says. “It gets to your head, that bullshit.” They had a deal with an indie label, Narnack Records. And they had a manager, an Iranian-American from Texas named Ali Salehezadeh, 32, who worked in advertising. In 2007, Ali caught a Hypernova show at a downtown venue in New York and offered to help. “He knew nothing about music at all,” says Raam. “He saw our band and fell in love with this whole movement.”

Ali says he learned how to manage a band by doing research online; and, because he came from a marketing background, it was his feeling that Hypernova needed a brand. Their L.A. experience was affecting their look and sound; they became darker and edgier, started dressing in modish three-piece suits. “What have we done? What have we become?” Raam sang in Hypernova’s song “American Dream” (2010).

Sanctuary

The Yellow Dogs—Obash, Looloosh, Koory, and Sina Khorrami—arrived in New York in January of 2010. In the footage Raam shot of picking them up at Kennedy Airport, they are slack with relief and joy. They had been living on and off for months in Turkey, where they had applied for their visas (also secured with an invitation from the SXSW festival). “I got choked up when I saw them for the first time,” says Kodi Najm, 24, of Hypernova. “I had a guilty feeling about being here and being slightly successful while they were still back in Iran.”

They moved into the apartment in Williamsburg shared by Raam and Ali, their new manager. In footage from one of their first nights in America, they are dancing around the kitchen. “It was our dream coming true,” says Koory, 25, “to be in the city where our heroes lived.” “We knew all these New York bands,” Obash says. “The Rapture, Interpol, Blondie. We knew about the Brooklyn scene.” Where they fit right in. Before coming to America, they had never heard the word “hipster.” “I Googled it,” Koory says, “and then I realized, I am one!” And now that they were free to play music, they just wanted to play—they didn’t care where or for how much. They played their first New York show at Cameo Gallery, a Williamsburg bar. Over the next two years, they built up a following, playing their danceable punk-rock tunes at venues in Brooklyn and Manhattan—the Brooklyn Bowl, the Mercury Lounge. In footage shot by Nariman Hamed one night in Williamsburg, they are walking along when some random fans recognize them and begin shouting, “Yellow Dogs! Yellow Dogs!” The boys shout back, “Yeah!” “They were so excited to be living this life,” says Pablo Douzoglou, 29, a Venezuelan who was their drummer between 2011 and 2012.

The giant loft they all moved into together on North 10th and Berry in Williamsburg, with Raam and Ali, in 2010 (it was an abandoned building in terrible shape), became a hub. Raam called it “the Sanctuary.” “We always had 15 to 20 people living in that house,” he says. “We had the wildest parties. It was Iranian musicians, painters, photographers. It was the same vibe we had in Iran, but without the fear.” “Everybody talked about their parties,” says Janelle Best, front woman for the indie band Desert Stars. “They had all-night bashes that were a lot of fun.”

But more than partying, the Yellow Dogs were creating a community; they fed everyone Persian food. “You were part of a family when you were with them,” says Pablo Douzoglou. “They were kids living together with this sense of brotherly love, of belonging somewhere.”

And their carefree, playful attitude was giving new life to their old friends in Hypernova. “They were a reminder of what I felt before I came here,” says Raam. In the summer of 2010, Hypernova and the Yellow Dogs went on tour together. They played more than 30 shows in five states and D.C., traveling across the country in vans. There was cigarette smoking and pot smoking in the Yellow Dogs’ van and sometimes the consuming of hallucinogenic mushrooms. Along for the ride, and sometimes singing with the band, was Ali Eskandarian, a soulful-voiced artist and musician who grew up in Dallas; he had moved into the loft on Berry Street soon after his first visit there. He called the Yellow Dogs “the kids.” They called him “Capitaine.”

Eschewing their manager’s nightly stipend for a hotel, the Yellow Dogs insisted on camping, as they often had in Iran. They pitched a tent in Yosemite. “Looloosh wanted to fish,” Obash says affectionately. They fell in love with America. “The nature!” Koory exclaims. “I was like, Oh my God, this is not fair, ’cause America’s so beautiful! We saw desert, snowy mountains, forests, and each of those are like the most beautiful one that we ever saw! I was like, This is not fair—even the desert in America is beautiful!”

And Americans they encountered fell in love with them. They played a sold-out show at the Troubadour in L.A. And in South Carolina they befriended a group of rural southerners in a bar. “I was afraid, the way they look, people were going to think they’re terrorists,” says Aaron Johnson, 31, then a keyboardist for Hypernova. But within minutes, he says, people were buying them drinks, playing pool with them. “They just wanted to know about them, their culture. They were, like, the best ambassadors.”

The Brotherhood

‘They did have that brotherhood,” Anthony Azarmgin says. “And it was very hard to get into that brotherhood, and if they didn’t like you, they would shut you off. They did it to me. And I did see it happening with Ali Akbar.” The shooter.

He was referring to a time in 2011 when he was living with the Yellow Dogs in the loft on Berry Street (having dual citizenship, he was able to travel to the United States freely), and he made some faux pas that ruffled feathers, including dating a girl who had formerly dated one of their crowd. “So they kicked me out.”

He acknowledges that the situation was his fault (“I was being a dick”), but being kicked out of the circle that had embraced him sent him into a tailspin of loneliness and self-doubt. Though he says he later “worked it out” with them, he still feels they were “treating people differently, treating them like ‘You’re cool enough’; ‘You’re not.’ It wasn’t like that in Iran. America changes people.”

The Great Divide

In December of 2011, the Free Keys finally made it to New York. They had been on a long road, from Iran to India, back to Iran, and then to Turkey. Their artists’ visas had been arranged with an invitation from the reliable SXSW festival. The band was now Pooya, Arash, and A.K. as bassist. Arya, the original Free Keys bassist, wasn’t able to get a passport, as he hadn’t done his military service in Iran, and since you needed to apply for the artists’ visas as an entire band, A.K. was asked to join them. “He was a bass player with a passport, basically,” Obash says grimly.

Ali had met with the Free Keys, including A.K., on a trip he made to Iran. He said that he would help them book gigs and obtain their visas, as he had done with the Yellow Dogs. He did not offer to be their manager. He had another reason for wanting to get the band to America: the Yellow Dogs needed a drummer. Sina, their original drummer, had moved to Canada; Pablo Douzoglou was only filling in. “At that point,” says Ali, “we decided Arash”—a very talented drummer—“is going to be in the band.” Arash was apparently in accord with this plan, and it was Pooya’s understanding that Arash would drum for both groups. “We were waiting for Arash,” says Koory.

It wasn’t only the prospect of having Arash play with them that made the Yellow Dogs want the Free Keys to join them in New York. “One of the reasons we got the 318 Maujer house was it was too big for us,” Obash says, “and we had it in our heads the Free Keys might come. We were always missing the community we had in Iran. So we said, Let’s make this place the Shangri-la for this community to bloom in America.”

But from the moment the Free Keys arrived in the United States, there were problems. The atmosphere at the Yellow Dogs’ new place on Maujer Street was much like at the Berry Street loft (minus Hypernova, which temporarily disbanded when Raam moved to London); it was a freewheeling zone with music and partying. And the Free Keys were arguing.

“The first two days, they were nonstop arguing,” Koory says—about whether “they should play or shouldn’t play shows, if they should start practicing,” says Ali, who also lived in the house. They were sleeping in the living room, in the middle of the space, and the tension between them seemed to fill the air.

In addition, A.K. was making them all uncomfortable. At first, they thought “he was an O.K. guy,” Obash says, “but the chemistry he had with us wasn’t like the chemistry we had with Arash and Pooya”—their friends for almost a decade, who seemed to be having issues with A.K. too: his freeloading, his habits. “Arash always said he smelled like chicken,” says Pooya.

And one of the first nights he was in America, A.K. did some things that shocked them all. They were at Union Pool, a Williamsburg bar, when he walked out wearing a jacket he had stolen. Minutes later, in the subway, he jumped the turnstile. “And I was like, Man, you just came from Iran. Aren’t you grateful that you are in this country?” says Koory. They were all seeking political asylum and were afraid they could be deported if arrested. “He laughed at us,” Pooya says of A.K. “He said, ‘You’re scared’; he was telling us, ‘You’re pussies.’ ”

Also, problematically, A.K. wasn’t cool. “We were having parties,” Koory says, “and he was just being weird to our friends; to girls, he would be sleazy.”

After less than a month, the Yellow Dogs say they asked the Free Keys to leave Maujer Street. “We told them, Go find yourself,” Ali says. They moved into a short-term sublet in Brooklyn Heights, a one-bedroom for the three of them. They tried for a few months to make their band happen, playing three shows at small Brooklyn venues, but they had problems finishing a set. “Ali Akbar never wanted to practice,” Pooya says, “and he wasn’t good.” And they had musical differences. A.K. was into metal, while the Free Keys were an alternative rock band.

In April, Arash started drumming for the Yellow Dogs; he moved back into Maujer Street, and Pooya did as well. Pooya kicked A.K. out of the Free Keys. A.K. was now living alone in an apartment in Ridgewood, Queens. It was May of 2012.

In Exile

‘Tell Ali Akbar fuck him and if he doesn’t pay me by August 10th [2012], I will request for additional money (for my services and delayed in payment) and even look into getting the law/police involved. I am not kidding and not afraid to cancel his visa—and yes we can do that,” Ali wrote in an e-mail sent in July of 2012. He was reacting to A.K.’s having requested to see the receipt (attached to the e-mail) from Tamizdat Artist Services, the American visa broker Ali had used to help the Free Keys renew their three-month artists’ visas; Ali had advanced the money. The cost was $875 per applicant, and the invoice shows that Ali wasn’t overcharging anyone. But A.K. was convinced that he was being cheated; he was calling, showing up at Maujer Street, accusing. “I was frustrated,” says Ali. “At that time, too, we were starting to think as a group, Wow, this guy is really out there. He was acting psycho.”

When Koory showed A.K. the receipt for the visa application, he says, “he was like, No, this is fake—you did a Photoshop. He made no sense. And when I saw his face, that he believed we were making money off him, I saw this guy obviously has problems. I was like, Thank you. I had a good time with you. Let’s not be friends. You don’t like us—you say it yourself.” “It wasn’t even our problem,” says Ali. They say they told him, Forget about the money—just don’t come back.

For the next 15 months, A.K. lived on his own in Queens and worked as a bike messenger for Breakaway, a courier service in Manhattan. “He was really nice and easygoing,” says a former fellow messenger. “He said he played bass in a band. He didn’t speak a lot of English, so the job was hard for him, ’cause it involves a lot of communication,” but “he never lost his cool.” He was likely making around $500 a week, the average for messengers at the company.

“He had a lot of misconceptions about America,” says Andrew Young, Breakaway’s general manager. “He got sick and I was like, ‘Well, do you have health insurance?’ And he said, ‘What’s that? Can’t I just go to the doctor?’ ”

A report from a deli owner in A.K.’s neighborhood said that he would often buy a 24-ounce beer on his way home. “He didn’t seem to have an alcohol or drug problem,” his co-worker says. He was losing weight. He kept a baseball cap on; just 29, he was almost completely bald.

And on Facebook he seemed to be developing an interest in conspiracy theories, delivering rants about the Illuminati. He was seen riding his bike around the Yellow Dogs’ neighborhood. “I thought maybe he’s going to see one of us in the street and hit us,” says Koory. He appeared at an art show on a roof in SoHo in August of 2012 that Ali had arranged for Icy and Sot. The street-artist brothers, Saman, 28, and Sasan Sadeghpour, 23, knew the Yellow Dogs from their Ghori Park days. They had arrived in the United States in July. (Ali was now their manager, too; he’d helped them get their visas.) Ali got security guards to escort A.K. out.

When A.K. came upon Ali, Anthony, Arash, and Sot one night at Union Pool, in mid-2012, he got into a fistfight with Anthony—who was now back in the Free Keys, which had re-formed with new members Pooya had found on Craigslist. The band was playing shows, doing well. “He came up to us,” Anthony says, “and he was like, What’s up, Amajoon”—a nickname the Yellow Dogs had for Anthony. “I was like, Don’t talk to me, man. First you gotta pay Ali your money.”

Their confrontation ended in violence, outside on the street, where Anthony put his knee in A.K.’s chest and struck him on the jaw. “It was weird,” Anthony says. “Every time I hit him, he would laugh.”

The following night, Anthony says, A.K. “texts me on Skype and says, ‘I will find you and I will fucking kill you.’ ” Anthony went to Maujer Street to warn the Yellow Dogs about what had happened, but he says they shrugged it off. “Koory was like, Don’t worry—this is America.”

Conspiracy of One

‘Dude,” A.K. texted one of his old friends in August of 2013. “You paid for our utilities and stuffs and I appreciate that and wanna pay it back! That’s it!! But about us I don’t actually remember why me and you had so much arguments and I don’t care anymore . . . to me it’s like I lost my best friend and that’s important, and it’s no good for me to be separated, it’s good for you cause I’m the bad guy. . . . And I miss you too.”

The person to whom he sent the text wrote back: “Ali poolesho mikhad”—“Ali wants his money.”

In late October, three weeks before the shooting, A.K. quit his job. “He felt he wasn’t being treated fairly by the dispatchers,” says his co-worker at the courier service. “He was having an increasingly hard time. His bike got stolen. He lost his cell phone. Then he left.”

With no job, no means of transportation or communication, his mental state seemed to unravel. He told people he’d left Breakaway because he had been asked to deliver a suspicious package to the World Financial Center. He was telling friends that he was going to kill himself. People didn’t take him seriously; they joked around with him about it on Facebook, suggesting ways for him to do it.

“And I’m still right here!” he posted. “Did you slit your wrists?” someone joked in Farsi. “No, man,” he wrote back, “it will hurt.” He told friends that he had tried to kill himself by taking an overdose of pills. Again, no one seemed to believe him.

It was about a week before the shooting when someone who knew him received a call from his mother in Tehran. “His mother said, Why don’t you want to see my son anymore?” says his former friend. “I said, He did some bad things. He did this and that. She said, My son is not like that at all.”

The day before the shooting, A.K. posted a picture on Facebook of a Spanish-made, Century Sporter .308-caliber rifle. It was sitting in a box with a zip tie attached to the magazine spring. “In chetore,” he wrote in Farsi—“How’s this?”

“Who to shoot first?” he asked in comments. People still didn’t take him seriously. Someone suggested he “deal with the landlord.” “The people here,” A.K. wrote, “they get mugged with a slap in the face.”

On the night of the shooting, November 11, the residents of Maujer Street had been sitting and talking for a long time around the table in the main living area, and now they were getting ready for bed. There were eight people in the house that night: Arash, Looloosh, Pooya, Icy, Sot, Ali Eskandarian, and an American couple in their 30s—Coast Guard members in town for Veterans Day events—who were subletting Ali Salehezadeh’s bedroom. He was in Brazil, he says, “visiting my future ex-wife.” Koory was working the door at the Cameo Gallery; Obash was working in a bar on the Upper West Side.

It was just after 12 A.M. Pooya and Looloosh were in their separate bedrooms, on the third and second floors, playing a pool game together on their phones. Arash was in his room on the third floor playing a video game on his PlayStation Vita.

Ali Eskandarian had been playing the guitar alone in the living room on the third floor. He had come back to New York just a few weeks before, after spending time with his family in Dallas. He’d been going through an emotional time in his life, recently quitting alcohol and drugs and making amends with people. He lay down on the couch to read before going to sleep.

Icy and Sot were in their bedroom, on the second floor, a makeshift space with a curtain for a wall. Sot was working on a piece of art on his computer; Icy was making stencils. The subletter couple was in the bathroom, taking showers.

Pooya heard the first shot. He thought it was a coconut he had bought, fallen from the top of the refrigerator. The shot had come through the window, hitting Ali Eskandarian, killing him.

Arash called, in Farsi, “What is that noise?” He ran out of his bedroom. Pooya heard another shot. He heard Arash, gagging, gasping for air.

The shooter made his way down to the second floor, kicking open doors and firing. He shot Looloosh in the chest, in his bed.

He sprayed the bathroom door with bullets, but none hit the subletters, who were crouching in the tub.

He fired down the hall and into the room where Icy and Sot were working. Shots flew around the room, one of them hitting Sot in the right arm. The bullet went through flesh, missing bone. Sot screamed and both brothers leapt back from the curtain. They never saw the gunman. “It was crazy noise,” Sot says. “I saw holes in the walls. I saw blood.” There was dust in the air. And then the brothers figured out what was going on, and they both screamed, “Looloosh!”

They scrambled for their cell phones and called 911. “Somebody’s shooting—we got shot,” they told the dispatcher. They heard the shooter continue back upstairs. They ran downstairs, out of the house. On the way, Icy saw Looloosh lying dead in his bed, his eyes turned upward.

Within minutes, there were police cars up and down Maujer Street, about 30 cops. Icy and Sot told them, “Our friends are inside there!” But the police didn’t go inside. “We heard more shots,” Sot says. “They didn’t do anything—they were just waiting.” It was presumably a safety protocol. (The N.Y.P.D. did not respond to requests for comment.)

A.K. was walking around the third floor, looking to see if anyone was left alive. He kicked open the door of Pooya’s room.

“Oh, so you’re here,” he said in Farsi.

Pooya was on the floor, hiding behind a low clothes rack with a curtain. “Don’t kill me,” he pleaded in Farsi. “What did I do to your life?”

“Stand up in front of me,” A.K. ordered, pointing the gun at him. “I can shoot you right now.”

Pooya slowly stood; he says A.K.’s face was “real calm.”

“This was my task,” A.K. told him. “I killed everybody. Next is you, and then I have to kill myself.”

“You think if you kill yourself you’re going to get satisfied?” Pooya demanded. He reminded A.K. of “all the good times we had together, even the bad times we had in America.” He reminded him he “did a lot of bad things to us.”

“And what did I do to you?” Pooya asked. “I just told you, Go out of my life. I just don’t want to see you anymore, and you came back and you kill everybody and you wanna kill me and yourself?”

They heard sirens. A.K. turned his face to the sound of more police arriving. That’s when Pooya grabbed the muzzle of the gun and pushed it away, hitting A.K. in the face with his right fist. A.K. pulled the trigger; bullets were flying around the room. “Tat-a-tat-a-tat—constant,” Pooya says. Some of them must have hit A.K., because there was now blood on him and on Pooya’s face and chest. “You shot me in my stomach!” Pooya screamed, hoping A.K. would believe he was already shot (he wasn’t).

They struggled for the gun, stumbling into Koory’s room, next door. They fell onto the bed, Pooya pushing the gun straight against A.K.’s throat while punching him in the face. He saw A.K. taking something out of his pocket—a gun clip; he was carrying five magazines containing 100 rounds of ammunition. “I was going to grab it, but he pulled my shirt and got me off him,” Pooya says.

A.K. yanked Pooya off the bed, flinging him through the door and toward the stairs, where he pushed him away, running up toward the roof. Pooya locked the door to the roof behind him. Now the cops were racing into the building. They heard a single shot. A.K. had killed himself.

“You Don’t Hear Stories Like That in Iran”

Since the day of the shooting, when then commissioner Ray Kelly called it the result of a “dispute . . . over money,” the N.Y.P.D. has provided few details other than to say that the gun was first legally purchased in 2006 in a now closed gun store in upstate New York. Iranians who knew the victims are perplexed at how the freedom their friends sought in America was taken away by the shooter. How did Ali Akbar Rafie—jobless, poor, and an immigrant with an expired visa—get his hands on an assault rifle?, they ask. “You don’t hear stories like that in Iran, people going nuts and blowing up their friends or family,” says the writer Hooman Majd. The parents of Ali Eskandarian issued a statement on their son’s Facebook page extending their condolences to the parents of all the victims. “To Ali Rafie,” they wrote, “from the bottom of our hearts, we forgive you.”

In Iran itself, the tragedy was a major story. “The Yellow Dogs are countercultural heroes there,” says an Iranian musician. There was controversy when Arash and Soroush Farazmand’s bodies were buried in the largest cemetery in Tehran, in a section reserved for prominent people in the arts. Some conservative religious figures in the country felt the brothers did not deserve this honor, but their funeral drew thousands. Ali Akbar Rafie’s sister Saideh Rafie promoted conspiracy theories on the Iran News Network, speculating that her brother was murdered by a Zionist organization as part of a plot to muddy negotiations between Iran and America about the curtailment of Iran’s nuclear-enrichment program and the lifting of sanctions.

The memorial for Arash, Looloosh, and Ali Eskandarian, in November at the Cameo Gallery, was terribly somber. Downstairs, in the performance space, which was alight with candles, people were invited to speak their memories, but for almost an hour no one managed to say anything. There was only hugging, crying.

“They were the cutest kids ever,” said Poya Esghai, former guitarist for Hypernova, talking of Arash and Looloosh later, upstairs in the bar. “They were so polite; they never did anything bad to anyone. They were always smiling and good musicians.” “If you had told them four years ago,” said their friend Jason Shams, “You’re going to go to America, play music, and have this great band, but in four years you’ll be shot dead, they still would have got on the plane.”

Correction: The original version of the story stated that the Free Keys were asked to leave the Yellow Dogs’ Maujer Street apartment, but according to Pooya Hosseni, the band left on its own accord. The story stated that the Free Keys were unable to finish sets at more than one show, but that occurred only once. The article also said that Hosseini lived alone with Ali Akbar Rafie, in Queens. Hosseini never lived alone with Rafie. We regret the errors.

Ali Akbar Rafie, known as A.K., playing bass with the Free Keys in Williamsburg in 2012. A year later he would murder the Yellow Dogs’ Arash and Soroush “Looloosh” Farazmand, and singer-songwriter Ali Eskandarian, before turning the gun on himself.

Photo: by Danny Krug.

A candlelight vigil in Williamsburg last November.

Photo: by Andrew Hinderaker.

Eskandarian and the Farazmand brothers, Arash and Looloosh, in 2013.

Photo: by Gabriela Fellet.

The Yellow Dogs rehearsing in Williamsburg in 2012.

Photo: by Dave Sanders/Polaris.

Hypernova, future Yellow Dogs, and friends in Tehran in 2005.

from King Raam.

Ali Akbar Rafie, known as A.K., playing bass with the Free Keys in Williamsburg in 2012. A year later he would murder the Yellow Dogs’ Arash and Soroush “Looloosh” Farazmand, and singer-songwriter Ali Eskandarian, before turning the gun on himself.